Hart Publishing Legal Recognition of Non-Conjugal Families: New Frontiers in Family Law in the US, Canada and Europe

This book argues that new families insufficient recognition is a legal problem which needs fixing in light of recent evolutions in family patterns and normative conceptions of family. People increasingly invest in relationships falling outside the model of the marital family such as non-conjugal unions of friends or relatives, polyamorous relationships, and various religious-based families. Despite this, Western jurisdictions retain the marital family as the relevant basis for allocating family law benefits, rights and obligations. Part I of the book illustrates recent evolutions in family patterns and norms, and how law can accommodate multiple family grids without legal recognition involving normalisation. Part II focuses on courtroom litigation on the basis that courts nowadays are central avenues of social change. Part II takes non-conjugal families as a case study and provides an analysis of the most compelling argumentative strategies that non-conjugal families can mobilise to pursue legal recognition in Canada, the United States, within the systems of the European Convention of Human Rights and the European Union. Through its comparative, interdisciplinary and critical legal method, the book provides scholars, activists, and policymakers conceptual tools to tackle the current invisibility of new families. Further, in its advancing legal arguments to enhance protection of non-conjugal families in courtrooms, the book illuminates the different approaches jurisdictions are likely to take and hindrances thereof to overcome to debunk stereotypes associated with proper familyhood.